Tell Me One Thing (25 page)

But they have worked out a way to be together, these two women. Clementine has carved out areas of responsibility that border Trudy’s but don’t overlap. She greets the public. She
remembers the children’s names. She loves to spend however long it takes helping people find exactly the right book. She reads everything new that comes into the library. And Clementine, thankfully, takes care of the two computers they have in the adult section.

Trudy does all the administrative work, usually spending her day in the glass-enclosed office that faces the front door. From her desk Trudy can observe what goes on in the library but not necessarily engage. Only on Thursdays when she transforms herself into the Story Lady, does she mingle with the patrons, and those are mainly children, Trudy’s humans of choice.

But Trudy likes Clemmie, even if she isn’t demonstrative in that regard, and Clemmie has figured that out. When she first started working at the library, fresh out of graduate school, Trudy intimidated her—so curt, nothing soft or yielding about her. But Clementine has learned that’s not entirely true. All the soft places were saved for Brian, and now that he’s gone, Clementine wonders these days whether those same tender spots have hardened off and begun to die.

For her part, Trudy considers Clementine pretty near perfect. Oh, of course, she’s too emotional. And she drives Trudy crazy with her solicitousness, but Trudy sees her goodness and her trustworthiness and her work ethic and her genuine love of books. The whole package, you have to take people as the whole package, Trudy knows by now in her life, and with Clemmie that’s easy to do.

Now Clemmie watches as Trudy takes the clipboard with the petition on it and places it at the far end of the front counter, nestling it among the pamphlets for the Sierra Villa Farmers Market on Friday afternoons and the Pancake Breakfast at the local fire station on the first Sunday of every month.

“Really?” Clementine asks.

“Really,” Trudy answers.

And people sign the petition as they leave with their checked-out books, Trudy is gratified to see. Every time another person signs on the dotted line, Trudy shoots Clemmie a look of triumph, and Clementine rolls her eyes.

TRUDY CONSIDERS THE DAY A SUCCESS
as she walks the four blocks home and turns onto her street, Lima Street. The signatures on her petition now take up five whole pages, and she’s not done yet. She wants to walk into that city council meeting with a thick wad of petition pages, all signed by irate citizens of Sierra Villa. She flips the sheets, considering the fruits of her indignation as she turns up her brick front path. The fact that her neighbor is zooming up his driveway at the same time in his black BMW convertible with his two sons in their Catholic school uniforms in the backseat barely registers.

But then the yelling starts, even before Trudy can get her key into the front door lock, and she stops and listens. It’s that scene-of-a-traffic-accident feeling—dismay and fascination in equal measure.

“Get in the house!” Kevin Doyle is yelling even as the boys walk up the driveway, dragging their overlarge backpacks, and step onto the front porch. For some reason, he never lets them enter the house by the back door, so much of their life is played out on the long driveway. The older boy, maybe seven, is more talkative. The younger one, the one who opened the door for Trudy yesterday, is quieter. Both are blond with the pasty white skin of their father and the small, pinched features of their mother.

The boys enter the house to the accompaniment of their father yelling, “Close the door, close the damn door!” Trudy is sure that
something unnatural happens in that house. Why else would he always be admonishing his sons to “get in the house,” to “close the door”? He doesn’t allow them to play on the front lawn or with the neighborhood children. She stands on her front porch, helpless, feeling that she should be doing something—intervening, protecting the boys—although she has no idea how she would accomplish either, when the Yeller starts his relentless cleaning. He has a power washer, a leaf blower, a car polisher, a chain saw, and various other mechanical devices Trudy can’t name. She knows them all by sound though. They all whine or whoosh or shriek.

Today it’s the leaf blower. He has a complex about keeping his driveway free of anything associated with nature. The sound! Oh, how Trudy hates that sound! So much uproar for so little result. Why doesn’t he take a broom like everyone else and sweep his driveway? With the blower, dirt and twigs and leaves launch up into the air in surprise and then settle back down on
her
driveway, which bothers him not at all and makes her want to scream back at him.

Instead, she quickly opens her front door and slams it shut with as much force as she can muster, a gesture she knows is lost on him. The whoop of the door closing is no match for the roar of the leaf blower.

From her kitchen window Trudy watches him. He’s got that disgusting cigar clamped in his protruding teeth and that tiny phone earpiece hooked to his right lobe (she hopes he gets a brain tumor from excessive cell phone use), and he’s methodically sweeping the blower across his driveway, right to left, where her driveway resides and where the debris flies over to and settles. Right to left, right to left—dirt and more dirt!

If only she and Brian had had the foresight to build a fence between their two properties as soon as this Kevin Doyle person
moved in. A tall, wooden fence so she wouldn’t have to see his rodent face. A very high wooden fence so that all the blowing in the world wouldn’t yield piles of debris on her driveway.

And then it occurs to her that she can build such a fence now. What’s stopping her? Only the habit of discussing every decision with Brian. Only the backbone she received from Brian’s calm wisdom. “Well, Brian’s not here,” she reminds herself. And this time she knows she has spoken aloud in her empty house. Not a good sign for anyone’s mental health.

She gets on her computer and finds the Angie’s List site. Brian bought himself a lifetime membership when they first posted the site because he was hopeless about home repair and relied on Angie’s recommendations when they needed a washing-machine part replaced or a shower floor regrouted. She types in “fence” and up pops a screen full of names; most are handymen or carpenters. She scrolls down and is overwhelmed. There are eight pages of names. This is way more than she bargained for. How does she narrow her search? Does she have to read all the reviews about all these guys? And then her eye catches a familiar name, Fred Murakami, and she sits back in her chair and contemplates it.

On the one hand, she knows who he is. On the other, he’s a most unpleasant human being. But then again, he probably won’t steal from her or disappear with the fence half done. She can easily track him down across the street.

She reads his reviews. They’re all good. He’s meticulous, an Old World craftsman. He takes his time, but his finished product is always worth it. She realizes she has to hire him.

There’s nothing to do but cross the street and knock on his door again. She waits until Kevin Doyle has finished with the leaf blower and has entered his house with a yell at his trademark high volume, “Get away from the window!” (Why, Trudy wants to know, why? What’s wrong with looking out the window?) And
then the street returns to its customary quiet.
That’s one of the reasons people move up here
, Trudy thinks as she crosses Lima Street,
the quiet, which is now permanently compromised. The luck of the draw
, she laments to herself. Trudy feels like Lady Luck has done an about-face. Until that awful September day last year, she would have considered herself among the luckiest. Now she’s afraid it’s going to be nothing but a slide through bad luck until the grave.

She heads up the cement path to the beige ranch house, and Fred Murakami watches her come, all the while debating whether to open the door. He doesn’t like aggressive women. His wife was no trouble at all, and though she’s been dead for close to thirteen years, he still misses her. No, he won’t open the door.

Trudy knocks with vigor and without stop. Her experience yesterday tells her that he doesn’t like to open his door and therefore, today, she is forewarned and determined. Finally, she wins the contest of wills. He opens the door a few inches, a deep scowl on his face.

“You make a lot of noise,” he says.

“Yes, well, it’s nothing compared to what he does,” and she indicates her neighbor’s house with a turn of her chin. “Haven’t you noticed the leaf blower and the power washer and the car buffer and the screaming, but of course you can’t fix the screaming.”

“I don’t fix screaming,” he says.

“But you could build me a fence along the driveway, couldn’t you?”

“Maybe.” He wants to say,
No, I can’t
, but the recession has hurt his business and he can’t be as cavalier about turning away work as he has been in the past.

“How much would that cost?”

“Depends.”

Trudy is getting exasperated again. Talking to this man is like wading through a vat of molasses. “On what?”

“The kind of materials, how high.”

“High enough so I never have to see the giant rodent.” And then Trudy realizes what she’s said. She’s spoken out loud the name she acknowledges only in the sanctity of her own mind. More fodder for her concern about her sanity.

“Made of what?”

“Wood.”

“And how long.”

“The whole driveway.”

He looks across the street at her driveway. He can’t see the far end from where he stands in his own doorway. “How many feet?”

“I don’t know,” and now exasperation is getting the best of her. “Bring a tape measure and come and see.”

He doesn’t want to start this, so he doesn’t move. She, however, is not going away, “Now, I mean now! Why can’t you measure it now?”

He shrugs. He can’t think of a reason except for the fact that he doesn’t want to engage with this woman.

“All right, come on, I’ll give you a tape measure.” And she turns and strides across the street, and he finds himself following her rapidly moving back. She walks with as much conviction as she talks.

By the time he gets to her driveway, she’s holding out a carpenter’s metal tape measure, the square box with the pliable steel coiled up inside, and she places it in his hand. As he gets down and measures the length of her driveway, she stands over him and continues talking, sotto voce. “He screams at his children. Do you hear him?”

“Sometimes.”

“Awful. So I want a fence.”

“All right.”

“How much?” she asks as he finishes measuring and stands up.

He studies the length of the driveway and considers. “Twelve hundred dollars.”

Trudy is taken aback. “That’s a lot of money.”

“Not for this fence. I’m giving you a discount. Nobody will build you a fence for less.”

And she believes him. She doesn’t know why she does, but she does. “Okay.” And then, “You need to start tomorrow.”

And again he finds himself saying, “All right.”

TRUDY WAKES UP THE NEXT MORNING
with a sense of purpose. Today the fence building starts! But when she looks out her kitchen window, out over her driveway, there’s nothing to see. There’s her empty driveway, looking no different from yesterday, and there’s her neighbor yelling at his boys to “get in the car! Why are you ALWAYS late, Aidan?! Every single morning you can’t get your butt in gear!”

Trudy sees the two boys scramble into the backseat of the convertible, the younger one, Trudy realizes he’s Aidan, tripping over his backpack. Kevin barely waits until they’re seated and then zooms out of the driveway, leaving a waft of cigar smoke lingering in the crisp November air. The fence won’t do anything about the smell, she knows. What kind of man smokes continually from seven forty-five in the morning, which it currently is, until well after midnight? Every night the west side of her house is assaulted by the putrid odor of cigar. He sits on his front porch whatever the weather, bundled up when it’s chilly, stripped to a pair of shorts when it’s warm, and smokes. And talks on the phone attached to his ear. In fact, he seems to work very little and sit there far too much, always on the phone.
Who would talk to this man
, Trudy wonders,
unless they had to?

One night, as she’s closing up the house, shutting windows
and thinking about going to bed, she hears him say, “Here’s how we’ll do it. It’s too easy to just fire him. We’ll promote him. Well, he’ll think it’s a promotion.” And he chuckles. “He’ll come work directly under me and then I won’t give him anything to do, not one job, and I won’t talk to him.” Trudy can hear the glee escalate in his voice, which positively skips along as he says, “We’ll freeze him out! He doesn’t exist! … Then he’ll quit. No liability. No paper trail. Hell, he even got a promotion!”

That night, as she heard him plot to humiliate someone, Trudy slammed all her windows shut, but she could tell from his conversation, which didn’t miss a beat, that her protest didn’t register.

This morning she’s waiting impatiently for Fred Murakami to show up. Yesterday, she gave him half his agreed-upon fee so he could go to Home Depot and buy wood. She walks into the living room and cranes her body out to the left to see if his truck is in his driveway. It isn’t. Hopefully, that’s where he is and when she gets home there will be a stack of freshly cut, sweet-smelling cedar planks piled on the driveway.

That is exactly what she sees when she turns onto Lima Street at five minutes after five, a very imposing pile of raw wood stacked neatly with no Fred Murakami in sight. Trudy searches the backyard, calls his name—nothing—so she marches smartly across the street and drills her knuckles on his door.

Fred watches her come from the barrier of his living room drapes and shakes his head. Sighing, he opens his door.

“I see you got the lumber.”

“Yes.”

“But nothing’s been done with it.”

“That’s not true. I’ve set the end posts and stretched the plumb line.”

Trudy has no idea what he just said.

“I work seven to four, that’s it. When four o’clock comes, I am finished for the day.”